Tension of Opposites
by Forever Written in the Stars
Summary: She knows this: gymnastics means something  maybe everything  and it has always meant something  maybe everything  to the people in her life.


Author's note: This fic focuses on the lives of the children of the main characters on Make It Or Break It. Just to clear something up, the Kmetko introduced in this chapter is not the child Emily was pregnant with at the end of season 2. She is Emily's second child.

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><p>Alana Tucker absentmindedly runs her fingertips along the rim of the pure, white bowl, almost wincing at the contact between her skin and the hot soup-filled bowl, but the wince is more reflex than anything; she can't really feel the pain of hot glass lightly searing her skin so her unseeing gaze remains calmly fixed on the white bowl and its contents as if tomato soup is the most fascinating thing in the world.<p>

She likes to think of the silence between them as a companionable one, likes to think the reason they don't talk is because they don't need to. She pulls her finger away from the bowl and runs her manicured fingertips against the cool, smooth oak of the table and glances up. He's reading Sports Illustrated. It's Wednesday. On Wednesdays, the magazine comes and during dinner, he flicks through the glossy pages, poring over stats and even, black and white print. She knows her dad. He knows her, and when she's honest with herself she thinks the silence that so often falls between them isn't a companionable one, borne out of the familiarity of such dinners. She thinks that he hates her for giving up on a dream, and she thinks she hates him for giving up on Mom, letting her go.

She wishes Chris were here, but she's noticed that he spends most of his time avoiding home, avoiding empty rooms and echoes bouncing off walls through the cavernous halls.

She looks down at her bowl, and she absentmindedly takes in the rich red hue of the tomato soup and looks at the beautifully browned grilled cheese sandwich sitting next to the bowl on a plate just as perfect and white and thinks it's funny how despite all the things they've forgotten (deliberately and not-so-deliberately), her dad's remembered this, remembered that it's her favorite, and she thinks that maybe, they don't hate each other after all.

She lets out a sigh, because she thinks it's time to swallow her pride and ask. Not for herself, because she doesn't need anything from him, hasn't needed anything from him since that January morning when the sun sparkled but the winds blew cold and he let her walk away with a hard gaze and blank expression written across his face. But for the team, because they need him, even if she doesn't.

She looks up. "Dad," she says and he looks up from his magazine for probably the first time since she sat down.

"Yes?" he asks, one eyebrow raised, and she thinks his voice sound scratchy, just the tiniest bit harsh as if it's faded from disuse.

"Um..." she trails off under his stare, biting her lower lip nervously, "We're preparing for a cheer competition, and our tumbling's a bit off, and one of the Monica - you remember Monica the captain, right?" she rambles, "Follows gymnastics a bit and she knows you and the Rock and she wanted me to ask if you'd be willing to help us out, but I told her you probably wouldn't but she's so... stubborn, and she kept bugging me to at least ask, and now, I've asked so you don't really need to say anything, and -"

"Fine," he cuts her off and her jaw almost falls in shock, "Be at the Rock at 3:30."

As she looks at him with shock in her eyes, he gets up with his magazine and empty dishes in hand and leaves, and she's alone again.

Story of her life.

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><p>Leah Kmetko sits against the wall on top of the soft blue mats, the weight of her body creating a soft indentation in the blue rubber. She examines her hands, eyes inattentively running over the blisters and calluses lining her palms. She can't for the life of her remember a time when her hands were smooth and soft so the blisters don't register as anything out of the ordinary, but she thinks that her wrist is maybe a tad bit swollen so she holds it up against her other wrist and sees that yes, it is swelling. She doesn't really care, though. She just needs to get through this day so she unzips her bag and pulls out a roll of clean white tape.<p>

She wraps the strips of tape around her wrist, binding the sticky adhesive to her skin, knowing full well that it will hurt when she has to pull the tape back off. She sighs as the tape wrinkles against the skin on her wrist and begins the process of peeling the tape back off her skin, wincing as the adhesive reluctantly tears away from her skin. As she pulls the tape off, it tangles and sticks to itself, and she sighs again as she realizes that she will have to start over.

She starts again, wrapping the rough white tape across her palms and around her wrists, making sure the tape is perfectly smooth and wrinkle-free. She knows that Alexandra doesn't like wearing tape, says it restrains her movement, but Leah likes the tape, revels in its sturdy construction. It doesn't stretch, doesn't break. It is security.

She lets out a sigh of relief when she sees she's done taping her wrist. She flexes her wrists, testing her range of motion, and the tape, it does restrict that, but she's okay with it so she moves on and tests her wrist with a handstand. It twinges, but she thinks that this is as good as it's going to get. Her wrist won't stop hurting and she'll never be more than a broken mess held together by scraps of tape. It's her life.

She spots Rachel on floor, throwing her hardest tricks but landing on the floor so lightly it hardly seems to move, and then she spots Alexandra up on beam landing layouts like she was born to, which if Leah thinks about it Alex was.

She spots her mom sitting in the parents' observation deck, mother and daughter separated by a wall of clear glass. She sends her mom a small smile but doesn't receive one in return. Not because her mom's mad at her or hates her or something, but because she's entirely absorbed in staring at the massive glossy poster bound to the back wall of the Rock's main gym.

She thinks her mother spends an inordinate amount of time staring at that back wall, and she gets it; she really does, but she thinks that more often than not, her mother spends more time staring at that glossy poster fixating on what could have been than watching her daughter.

Leah remembers walking into the Rock for the first time when she was thirteen, and the first thing she saw was that massive poster mounted on the wall, and it was perfect. Glowing smiles pasted across the faces of Payson Keeler, Kaylie Cruz, Lauren Tanner, Kelly Parker, Andrea Conway, and Elizabeth Barker, the USA's dream team at the 2012 Olympics in London. She looked at the glossy photo, a moment frozen in time and saved for the rest of the world to see and thought one day, I want that to be me. She would later realize that her mother looked at that same picture, eyes wide and shocked as if she had seen a ghost. Emily Kmetko had looked at that poster and thought that could have been me.

Had things gone differently, Leah thought, her mother could've been happy.

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><p>Rachel Keeler spends most of her spare time at the Rock for obvious reasons, the first being the fact that her aunt and guardian is at the Rock almost twenty-four hours a day and the other being the fact that she thinks gymnastics is fun. She thinks, though, that people sometimes forget that gymnastics is supposed to be fun.<p>

Gymnastics, she thinks, is about flight and jumping and all those fun things you get to do as a kid without anyone judging you. Once you hit twelve, you don't get to run around pretending to fly, jumping, or hopping around on playground, but the way she sees it, gymnastics is a way to do all those things without fear of judgment long after you pass sixteen. She's noticed that every apparatus in the gym is really just a piece of playground equipment. The uneven bars, parallel bars, rings, and high bar are all like the monkey bars. Floor is really just like playing on a trampoline or running and jumping around through the dirt and grass, and well she hasn't really managed to find a fitting metaphor for beam or vault yet, but that's beside the point. The point is that gymnastics is supposed to be fun, and when it stopped being fun because of all the politics and pressure and stuff about the Olympics, she had walked away... well, not really.

She is still a kid at heart, and well, the gym functions as her own personal playground where no one judges her for wanting to fly more than anything so she hangs around at the Rock, sometimes training, sometimes not, sometimes competing, sometimes not. Maybe she'll get a scholarship. Maybe she won't. None of that's the point.

The point is flying, and she thinks that in the midst of all this mess, a lot of people have lost sight of that so she hangs around the gym, flying and leaping and bounding, hoping that she can show someone that gymnastics isn't this do-or-die thing. It's not a big deal. It should be about flying, because really, all man's ever wanted is to fly, and Rachel thinks gymnastics is the closest man's ever come.

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><p>Some reporter, one of thousands in a mass that Alexandra Gallagher couldn't be bothered to think about as individuals, once asked her what she thought gymnastics was about.<p>

She hadn't answered, but she heard and listened because that was what she did, and for whatever reason, that question had stuck, bounced around her brain and in her thoughts and bothered her until she could put a name to that feeling. She thinks it's weird how some fleeting question asked by some random reporter just looking for a story could become so significant to her, but she figured it out.

She thinks that gymnastics is about bending and never breaking. She thinks it's about smiling even as your world and dreams fall to pieces before your very eyes. She thinks it's about life, and she's not philosophical. She really isn't, but she knows this: gymnastics means something (maybe everything) and it has always meant something (maybe everything) to the people in her life. She also knows this: gymnastics isn't just about her life or her family's life or her friends life. It's bigger, because it just_ is_, and she knows it with every fiber of her being.

Sometimes, in life, you fall. You fall from grace. You fall in love. You fall from power. You fall and break. You fall and sometimes there's someone there to catch you, like the soft blue mats that line the floor, and you almost always get back up.

Sometimes in life you bend. Sometimes you break. Your morals bend. Your principles bend. Your ideals bend. And sometimes you bend too far and break, and sometimes it's not about who's the best or the most talented or who works the hardest; sometimes it's about who can bend the furthest without breaking and keep a smile pasted upon their face.

She's seen people fall and bend and break, on and off the mats; she just hopes she doesn't fall apart.


End file.
